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The blockbuster palette on your own clip: blue-green shadows and backgrounds, warm faces and lights. Control how far it goes and keep the skin believable.
Teal and orange color grading pushes the shadows and the background towards blue-green while faces, warm lights and highlights lean orange, so the people in a shot stand out from everything around them. The tool above opens with Blockbuster, our main look in the Teal & orange category; drag Intensity to decide how strong it is, and press All looks (L) to compare the gentler and bolder versions in the same chip.
The look is famous partly because it is so easy to overdo. Pushed too far, skin goes the colour of a carrot and every grey wall turns aquarium blue. The fix is to check faces against the skin tone line on the Vectorscope while you work, which the steps below cover. If you want a broader film feel rather than this one palette, see cinematic colour grading; to swap one colour in the frame for another, use change a colour in a video.
Choose Select video or drop the file onto the tool. Blockbuster is applied as soon as the first frame appears.
Move Intensity (keys - and =). Around half often gives a modern, restrained version; full strength is the poster-and-trailer style. Open All looks (L) and the Teal & orange chip to try the variations.
Open Pro tools (P) and look at the Vectorscope. Faces should cluster along the skin tone line. If they swing past it towards red or yellow, lower Intensity or reduce Saturation for the Orange band on the HSL tab.
On the Effects tab, set the shadow hue with Shadow tint and the warm side with Highlight tint, each with its own amount. Tint balance moves the point where one hands over to the other.
Select Export video, then Download video when Your video is ready appears. To reuse the palette in another editor, Export .cube (Shift+L) saves its colour as a LUT.
Human skin, whatever its depth, falls within a narrow band of hues between red and yellow. Lighter and deeper skin differ mainly in brightness and saturation, not in hue. On a colour wheel, the direct opposite of that band is a blue-green: teal. Placing a colour beside its complement gives the strongest possible contrast in hue, so a warm face against a teal background separates even when both are equally bright.
There is also a practical reason. Daylight shadows are lit by blue sky, and artificial interior light is warm, so many real scenes already contain the two halves of the palette. The grade simply exaggerates and tidies what the camera recorded.
Grading a whole feature digitally became practical around 2000; the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? is usually cited as the first Hollywood film finished that way. Once colourists could shift hues selectively across an entire film, the warm-against-cool split spread through action cinema, then into trailers, music videos and eventually phone presets. By the 2010s it was common enough to become a running joke among critics, which is why today’s versions tend to be more subtle.
The classic failure is applying the orange to the whole highlight range. Skin already sits on the warm side, so it gets pushed further than anything else and ends up looking sunburnt or fake-tanned. A few habits avoid it:
Different shots need different amounts. A sunset beach may already be orange and teal, while an overcast street needs more help. Set Intensity per clip rather than forcing one setting on everything.
Every major editor can build this look by hand; the approach is the same in each: cool the shadows, warm the highlights, then rein in skin.
Or build it here and take the colour with you: Export .cube writes the current grade as a LUT at 33 or 65 points, which those editors can load. Grain, vignette, halation and bloom are not part of a LUT, so add texture in the other app if you need it.
Skin tones are orange-ish, and teal is their opposite on the colour wheel, so warm faces against a cool background stand out strongly. Digital grading made it easy to apply across whole films from around 2000, and action cinema adopted it widely.
Keep faces on the skin tone line of the Vectorscope, put most of the effect into the shadows rather than the highlights, and lower Orange saturation on the HSL tab if faces start to look sunburnt.
Yes: grade your clip with Blockbuster or another Teal & orange look, then use Export .cube (Shift+L) to download it as a LUT at 33 or 65 points. It is an original look made here, free to use in your own work.
In CapCut desktop, use the Color wheel and HSL tools in the Adjustment tab or import a .cube LUT. In Premiere 26.x, use Shadow Tint and Highlight Tint in Lumetri Color’s Creative section. Either can load a .cube exported from this tool.
Yes. Both names describe the same split: cool blue-green shadows and backgrounds, warm skin and highlights.
Green foliage sits close to teal, so a strong shadow tint pulls it further. On the HSL tab, select Green and adjust its Hue back towards yellow, or reduce Intensity for that clip.